"I SHALL LIVE FOREVER--AND EVER--AND EVER!"

But they were obliged to wait more than a week because
first there came some very windy days and then Colin
was threatened with a cold, which two things happening
one after the other would no doubt have thrown him into
a rage but that there was so much careful and mysterious
planning to do and almost every day Dickon came in,
if only for a few minutes, to talk about what was happening
on the moor and in the lanes and hedges and on the borders
of streams. The things he had to tell about otters'
and badgers' and water-rats' houses, not to mention birds'
nests and field-mice and their burrows, were enough
to make you almost tremble with excitement when you
heard all the intimate details from an animal charmer
and realized with what thrilling eagerness and anxiety
the whole busy underworld was working.

"They're same as us," said Dickon, "only they have to
build their homes every year. An' it keeps 'em so busy
they fair scuffle to get 'em done."

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The most absorbing thing, however, was the preparations
to be made before Colin could be transported with sufficient
secrecy to the garden. No one must see the chair-carriage
and Dickon and Mary after they turned a certain corner
of the shrubbery and entered upon the walk outside
the ivied walls. As each day passed, Colin had become
more and more fixed in his feeling that the mystery
surrounding the garden was one of its greatest charms.
Nothing must spoil that. No one must ever suspect
that they had a secret. People must think that he
was simply going out with Mary and Dickon because he
liked them and did not object to their looking at him.
They had long and quite delightful talks about their route.
They would go up this path and down that one and cross
the other and go round among the fountain flower-beds
as if they were looking at the "bedding-out plants"
the head gardener, Mr. Roach, had been having arranged.
That would seem such a rational thing to do that no one
would think it at all mysterious. They would turn into
the shrubbery walks and lose themselves until they came
to the long walls. It was almost as serious and elaborately
thought out as the plans of march made by geat generals
in time of war.

Rumors of the new and curious things which were occurring
in the invalid's apartments had of course filtered
through the servants' hall into the stable yards
and out among the gardeners, but notwithstanding this,
Mr. Roach was startled one day when he received orders
from Master Colin's room to the effect that he must report
himself in the apartment no outsider had ever seen,
as the invalid himself desired to speak to him.

"Well, well," he said to himself as he hurriedly changed
his coat, "what's to do now? His Royal Highness that wasn't
to be looked at calling up a man he's never set eyes on."

Mr. Roach was not without curiosity. He had never
caught even a glimpse of the boy and had heard a dozen
exaggerated stories about his uncanny looks and ways
and his insane tempers. The thing he had heard
oftenest was that he might die at any moment and there
had been numerous fanciful descriptions of a humped
back and helpless limbs, given by people who had never seen him.